Khaleeji

Gulf music, from sawt and the pearl-diving song repertoire to contemporary Khaleeji pop.

Khaleeji covers the music of the Arabian peninsula’s coast, and its oldest layers come off the water: the fijiri work songs of the pearl-diving crews, and sawt, the urban sung-poetry form developed by Kuwaiti and Bahraini musicians and spread from there across the Gulf.

The rhythms are the giveaway. Gulf music leans on 6/8 patterns and an interplay of hand-claps and drums that no other Arabic regional style uses in quite the same way, and it survives intact under modern production.

Contemporary Khaleeji pop is one of the largest music markets in the Arab world, and the term here covers both it and the traditional repertoire it grew from.